The Structure of Classroom Events and Their Consequences for Student Performance.

Mehan, Hugh

Questions about students' competence in classrooms are addressed in three parts: the suitability of ethnography as a research strategy, a summary of research that examines the social organization of classroom events, and the consequences of this organization for students' performance in the classroom. The discussion of methodology leads to the observation that the objective facts and subjective states associated with education, like those associated with other cultural domains, are interactional accomplishments. What students say and do to be judged effective by their peers and teachers can be investigated by constitutive ethnographical methods examining the structure of classroom events. The studies reviewed take the perspective of the participants inside the classroom and concentrate on how the classroom is organized on a daily basis. Teacher-student interactions would seem to be rhythmic, cooperative activities involving complex coordination of speech and gesture. Interaction is segmented and, to some extent, controlled by systematic shifts in postures, conversational rhythms, and prosody. The configurations of interaction are shown to have practical consequences. Studies indicate that effective classroom participation involves the integration of academic content and interactional form. (AMH)